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Nobel Laureate André Gide on the Five Elements of a Great Work of Art

“You come to doubt whether there is any secret there; it seems that you touch the depths at once. But ten years later you return to it and enter still more deeply.”

By Maria Popova

“To harmonize the whole is the task of art,” the great Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky wrote in contemplating the spiritual element in art and the three responsibilities of artists. “The aim of art is insight, understanding of the essential life of feeling,” philosopher Susanne Langer asserted a generation later in her trailblazing treatise on the purpose of art. But even more nebulous and nuanced than the question of why we make art is the question of what art — great art — is. “Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts,” Kafka offered.

Three decades before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight,” Gide writes on a loose, undated page from his 1918 notebook:

All great works of art are rather difficult to access. The reader who thinks them easy has failed to penetrate to the heart of the work. That mysterious heart has no need of obscurity to defend it against an overbold approach; clarity does this well enough. Very great clarity, as it often happens for the most beautiful works… is, to defend a work, the most specious girdle; you come to doubt whether there is any secret there; it seems that you touch the depths at once. But ten years later you return to it and enter still more deeply.

in which the inattentive reader sees only a cascade of words, I see the perfect definition of the work of art. I take each one of these words separately, next I admire the garland they form and the effect of their conjunction; for no one of them is useless and each of them is exactly in its place. I should quite willingly take them as titles of the successive chapters of a treatise on aesthetics:

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Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week's most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science, philosophy, creativity, children's books, and other strands of our search for truth, beauty, and meaning. Here's an example. Like? Claim yours:

midweek newsletter

Also: Because Brain Pickings is in its twelfth year and because I write primarily about ideas of a timeless character, I have decided to plunge into my vast archive every Wednesday and choose from the thousands of essays one worth resurfacing and resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces:

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